Books: Mysteries That Bloom in Spring

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New trends and names keep the plots boiling

They are the insomniac's solace, the commuter's opiate, everymitty's escape from idiot box and cuckoo's nest. Novels of crime, mystery and suspense are by far the most widely read form of literature in most of the Western world, and not infrequently the best written. Asked some 35 years ago to name the worthiest American novelist, Andre Gide replied unhesitatingly: Dashiell Hammett. (Because, said the author of The Immoralist, Hammett "never corrupted his art with morality.") Yet few contemporary critics treat the mystery as anything more substantial than a mental pacifier; the genre is accorded scantier and less prominent review space in most journals than the mindless TV special or the memoirs of unmemorable statesmen.

No wonder, as the redoubtable crime writer Stanley Ellin (The Luxembourg Run) observes, that "there's this mystery writers' syndrome, the feeling that we're really not top drawer. We've never been mainstream, we'll never be nominated for Pulitzers. The word is that Graham Greene will never be considered for a Nobel because he's cursed with the mystery stigma."

It is a truism nonetheless that future historians may get their surest handle on today's world by studying Martin Beck's Stockholm, the Amsterdam of Van der Valk and Grijpstra, the England of Merle Capricorn and Adam Dalgliesh, Inspector Ghote's Bombay, José Da Silva's Rio, the Manhattan of Inspector Schmidt and Detective Steve Carella, Fred Fellows' Connecticut, Sam Spade's San Francisco and Travis McGee's Florida.

At the weeklong Second International Congress of Crime Writers, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America* and attended by some 300 practitioners in Manhattan last month, there were clues aplenty that the literature may be headed for better days—even, as Author Edward Hoch (The Spy and the Thief) suggested, for a new Golden Age comparable to the period of the '20s and '30s. Among other hopeful portents, an increasing number of colleges and high schools are offering courses in mystery writing. The University of California's San Diego extension has embarked on an ambitious program reprinting classics, and it is assisting with a thriller series for public television. A number of mystery bookshops are flourishing, from London's Shepherd Market to Sherman Oaks in Los Angeles. Several small presses thrive on hard-cover editions. For example, the two-year-old Mysterious Press, founded by New York's Author-Editor Otto Penzler (The Great Detectives), has already published six new hard-cover titles, including Isaac Asimov's ingenious Sherlockian Limericks.

Crime and mystery authors are as devoted to their roots as Alex Haley. Among the literary influences and progenitors they mostly soberly cite are the Old Testament, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Leibniz, Spinoza, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Voltaire, Diderot, Hugo, Conan Doyle, Vidocq, Gaboriau, Twain, Poe, Wilkie Collins, Coleridge, Melville, R.L. Stevenson and Vachel Lindsay—not to mention the modernists from Maugham to Christie to Greene, Simenon to Deighton and Le Carré. Even Nabokov.